Engines of the Broken World by Jason Vanhee Read Free Book Online Page A

some grunting and struggling, we rolled poor Mama onto the sheet and folded it around her except for leaving it open where her bare foot was. I shuddered to touch her, but she didn’t move at all, gave no sign that she had been singing to me just an hour or two before. I snatched up both towels when we were done, before Gospel could maybe notice, not that he would have cared. He just went back to his tea, which he was drinking an awful lot of. Both towels ended up on the counter, the fine tea towel beneath the rag one, and I realized I was mighty hot in all my layers, in the warm air of the kitchen, and went to stand by the back door, where it was a little cooler.
    Only a few minutes passed before the darning was done, and the sock was slid back over the bare foot and the body wrapped up, all without me so much as moving. Gospel had taken care of the shrouding but then gestured me over, and together we managed to lift the body, him taking the head and me the feet, Mama stiff and unmoving, and the Widow Cally getting the door. The Minister led us out and paced across the snow, somehow not breaking through the surface, though I knew from experience that the little made thing weighed a good fifteen or more pounds. But with such a thing one couldn’t say what might happen, and this was just a touch of strangeness on top of the rest. At the barn door, the Widow had to struggle to get it open at all, what with the snow, and in the end we set the wrapped body down on a white powdery bed and shoveled out some snow and eventually got the door open.
    It was as cold inside as out, or very nearly, and I knew that would be trouble for the animals. But it shouldn’t have been this cold at all, this bone-chilling tooth-chattering knee-knocking cold that even in January we didn’t get, and especially not when it was barely fall, even if we were coming off a spell of cold winters. The Widow ducked inside right quick behind the Minister, softly noting how cold it was, her breath steaming from her mouth in a great gout. The goats in their pen were lying down and still, and the chickens were all huddled together with their feathers fluffed out, and after we set Mama down on the hard packed earth I went to check on them while Gospel fetched down shovels from the tool rack on one wall. The goats were cold as ice, dead for sure, and the chickens barely warmer, though the red hen in the middle of the mass stirred when I touched her, so I supposed she was still alive. For the rest, that was all our animals gone, and winter only just beginning, and that was a bad thing. Though if the fog was really coming, and the end of everything with it, I didn’t guess it much mattered.
    “The goats and all but one chicken are dead, and that one might not live,” I said.
    “Well, take that one over to the house, and I’ll set to digging a little,” Gospel said.
    “Yes, go on with it, girl, and hurry back to help with the shoveling,” the Widow urged. She was pacing about, beating her gloved hands on her opposite sleeves to try to keep herself warm. About that time, Miz Cally must’ve been wondering, why she was only wearing one hat, a question I for certain was asking myself. It just took me a moment to hurry across the way with the red hen and wrap her up in both the towels and rest her near the stove, where there was some comfort, and then hurry back in time to hear Gospel curse a blue streak.
    The ground in the barn was packed down hard, which we expected, but it was also nearly frozen with the cold, which we hadn’t expected. But then, we hadn’t thought it would get so very chilly in the barn. For all that he jumped onto the shovel with his weight, and pushed and thrust and gave it his best, the ground would barely crack for Gospel. It was obvious after a few minutes that we couldn’t bury Mama here, any more than we could outside.
    “Told you we shouldn’t have even bothered,” Gospel said, tossing down the shovel fifteen minutes later,